Singapore education experience

It has been sometime since I left the Singapore education system. My experience? Well, it is really a mixed bag of feelings. I treasure some of the best memories from my schooling days and yet also experienced some of my worst nightmares from it. But to sum it all up in one posting perhaps does not do justice to 16 years spent under the Singapore education system. However, I will try.

I shall not count my kindergarten days as part of the sixteen years. After all, this phase of my schooling was not really compulsory. But as both parents were working, and also because it is the norm for kids to attend some kind of class before formal education truly begins, I was enrolled into kindergarten. To think of it, I do not remember much of my kindergarten except the place and the person who I attended it with. It was located some distance away from my house but near enough to my mum's workplace so that she could pick me up after work. A babysitter would pick me up after lessons and I would eat lunch at the place followed by a really boring wait for my mum to end work and pick me up.it was that boring I remember. There were no toys there and I literally whittled my afternoons away just sitting at the living room all by myself.

That perhaps explains a lot about my personality now that I think of it. I like my own free time and quiet space. Now I know where this habit came from!

Seriously, I do not remember much about kindergarten or what I did or learnt. I guessed I must have learnt something useful but then again I am not sure. All I remember were the recesses,the sports days, birthday celebrations, having to sit cross-legged on the cement floor.. There were no air-conditioned classrooms then so u can imagine how uncomfortable it got.

Fast forward to primary school.

I seriously was blur during my primary school days. For the first year, I literally did not know things like homework were meant to be completed and that the spelling lists was meant to be revised. I failed my spelling tests horribly and then only realized that the list of words the teacher had given out days before were the words she was reading out loud in front of class! I still remember the first spelling test when the teacher just walked into class, announced that it was time for spelling and started reciting the words out. Before I knew what was happening, she had already read out two words. By the time I got out my exercise book, she had read through almost half the list! Not that I could spell the words since I did not even know what a spelling test was and the need to do revision. It was only after like two or three spelling tests that I plucked up the courage to ask a classmate what the heck was going on and how on earth he knew how to spell . He then looked at me quizically, took out the spelling list and showed it to me. That was when I finally understood what the whole thing was about. For two to three weeks, I had been wondering what the teacher was babbling about and how she even expected us to spell the words when had i never heard them in my life.

Primary school got more fun when I started making friends and getting a hang of schoolwork. I hated doing homework though and remembered the times I used to leave it to the last minute before completing them. Sometimes, I was even doing my homework in the bus! But primary school was fun for all its innocence, the silly games, the ghost stories we made up, the canteen food and of course, the bus ride home. The exams were killers but I got streamed to EM2, just barely making the grade for EM1 by 2 marks. I was in the second best class and studied really hard for my PSLE. I never had much ambition and thought that my highest score could get was 230. We did not do mock tests then so there was no way of knowing except through the school's internal exams before PSLE. I also did not have any tuition so I was not expecting much. My parents also placed little pressure on me and just asked me to do my best. And then, there were also the many nights spent arguing with my parents that algebra was not allowed and could only draw boxes to work out the answer.(my parents still taught me algebra and told me to use it to double check my answers. ) till today, I am still not sure how to use the stupid boxes to solve a problem! To cut a long story short, I got 262 for my PSLE, straight 6 points for my O levels, fumbled my way through junior college and graduated with good enough results to be hired and paid reasonably well.

And till today, I am not sure what knowledge I have gained during my schooling years that I have used in my career. My wife told me that all the schooling has taught me to think. But I really wonder whether it has. One thing is certain though. Employers do look at your results and the better your results are, the more doors will open. But guess what? All the successful people I know in my cohort tend not to do too well academically but still managed to excel in their respective fields.

Bonuses and Dividends - Dec 2010

End of the year. Have received nice bonuses and also some dividends from certain stocks that I hold. What should I do with the money? I haven't really decided yet but it will most likely be saved, spent and also given away. But majority should be put into savings based on my current estimates.

It looks like I will end the year on a high too. The stock market is recovering, and everything has been going well. Perhaps it is time to pamper myself and the family.

Or perhaps it is time to buy some stocks. Do check out OCBC's Market Strategy for 2011 as well as Phillip Capital

I wonder what stocks people are looking at for 2011. Time to do my compilation once again.

Work has been busy and I can't wait for the Christmas break to come!

Spent US$50 Registering A Domain Name

So Christmas is coming. And over the weekend, I spent US$50 to register a domain name for one of my sites which I wanted to shift from the current blogspot to a .com domain. The $50 was paid off from the ad revenue I received from 2 sites. The money was still stuck in paypal so I decided to just use it to register a domain name for the fun of it. Or should I just say: to gain some experience?

Not too sure whether it is worth the investment but guess I can see whether it works out in the end and then decide a year later whether I still want to keep that domain name.

Anyway, it was really troublesome setting up the account and stuff. I was using GoDaddy but was fumbling through it and wasn't really sure how to get the Wordpress up too. I made a fatal mistake in that I did not configure Wordpress on the root directory and ended up having to delete it and reinstall it again. That was like the killer move which wasted a few hours of my precious time.

Hopefully all this will be settled and I can unveil my new site soon. (Or if the way things are going, it might be weeks or even years =)

Oh well, guess that is all part and parcel of life. Sometimes, things just move slower than we expect them to take place.

Weekend Crowds

I am not really sure that I enjoy weekends anymore. I mean, I don't really enjoy going to malls on weekends as they are just so crowded. And crowds tend to make my blood pressure go up. I just need my own personal space. And sometimes, it is difficult to find that space during weekends as every single place I can think of is often so crowded. So staying at home sometimes works best for me.

Reflections for Today

Email is not work. Many people spend alot of time emailing thinking that it is work. But it really isn't. Your work should not be quantified by the number of emails that you manage to churn out each day. It is highly unproductive to be sending out emails. For every email that you send out, you probably get 5 in return.

Alot of work is actually not work. Stop acting busy. Just being busy the whole day does not mean that you are doing real work. You can be very busy but not be getting any real work done.

Most work can get done when we talk. If we talk, we can actually get much more work done rather than emailing.

You are probably uglier and stupider than you think you really are. Most people think that they are above average in intelligence and looks. That surely cannot be the case.

If you are employed, you are most probably being paid for your time. We all are paid differently for our time. The high income earner works probably the same amount as a normal person. But his relative income is much higher. Does your boss pour in more hours than you? Unlikely. He probably works the same number of hours as you. Why is he paid more? Food for thought....

Do you really want to climb the corporate ladder and have less time for your family?

Breakfast at $13 and Ramen at $38

Weekend is almost gone. It is now 12.49am and I don't know why I can't sleep. Perhaps it was the ice lemon tea that I drank just now. Or perhaps it is the thought that this is going to be another long week at work.

Breakfast today cost me a grand total of $13. Nothing special really. But I love breakfasts and just watching the crowds go by. It really doesn't matter what I eat for breakfast but I must say that the ambience is important to me. At least during the weekends.

Lunch was ramen and it cost roughly $38 for 2 bowls of ramen. It was so-so.

Well, dinner was relatively cheap as we ate at S11. Nothing special, just some fish and chips.

So grand total I spent on food today was ...way past $50. Is that expensive? Can I save more money?

Making Saving Fun

So fun theory believes that something that is fun is able to change people's behaviour for the better. And I guess they might be right. So maybe the same idea applies. If we can make savings fun for people, perhaps it will encourage more people to save up for their retirement. Time to think out of the box.

Here are some videos from fun theory:

Alternative Investments - Own the Sun

Apparently from a news report, somebody now owns the sun. This is really innovative as people exploit loopholes in the law to register themselves as the lawful owners for planets, the moon and now even the sun. She apparently wants to charge people for using the sun. How ridiculous can this be? Since she is the rightful owner, can I sue her if it gets too hot? The news report is below:

MADRID - AFTER billions of years the Sun finally has an owner - a woman from Spain's soggy region of Galicia said on Friday she had registered the star at a local notary public as being her property.

Ms Angeles Duran, 49, told the online edition of daily El Mundo she took the step in September after reading about an American man who had registered himself as the owner of the moon and most planets in our Solar System.

There is an international agreement which states that no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, but it says nothing about individuals, she added.
'There was no snag, I backed my claim legally, I am not stupid, I know the law. I did it but anyone else could have done it, it simply occurred to me first.'

The document issued by the notary public declares Ms Duran to be the 'owner of the Sun, a star of spectral type G2, located in the centre of the solar system, located at an average distance from Earth of about 149,600,000km'.

Ms Duran, who lives in the town of Salvaterra do Mino, said she now wants to slap a fee on everyone who uses the sun and give half of the proceeds to the Spanish government and 20 per cent to the nation's pension fund. She would dedicate another 10 per cent to research, another 10 per cent to ending world hunger - and would keep the remaining 10 per cent herself. -- AFP